Extremely OK Games, creators of the popular platformer Celeste, have announced that their follow-up game Earthblade has now been cancelled. This was announced in a news post on their official website yesterday, January 22nd.
In the post titled "Final Earthblade Update" written by developer Maddy Thorson they mention clearly "Late last month, Noel and I made the difficult decision to cancel Earthblade". They said the decision was made in December but they waited until now to announce it.
As for why? Their team had a breakdown in communication with Pedro Medeiros, who they said is was "a founding member of EXOK, longtime friend & collaborator, and art director of Earthblade and pixel/ui artist on Celeste and TowerFall". The issue: "a disagreement about the IP rights of Celeste" which they said they won't be going into publicly.
Medeiros has moved onto their own game with Neverway. Worth noting that Medeiros did post on X back in November 2024 that they had left EXOK:
The decision to cancel Earthblade, the post from Thorson makes clear, was made by Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry. As for why? Multiple reasons it seems. The game wasn't as far along as they had hoped, along with the pressure of Celeste's success: "Celeste's success applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting".
Other members of their team have moved on now too, so Thorson and Berry are going back to smaller-scale projects and have begun prototyping again.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
pleasereadthemanual 6 hours ago
While this has shaken out other members of the team have moved on as well. Noel & I now want to take all of the (many!) lessons we've learned from Earthblade, wipe the slate clean, and refocus ourselves back to smaller-scale projects. We're prototyping again and exploring at our own pace, and trying to rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste's or TowerFall's inception. We still, of course, hope to collaborate with Amora, Kyle, Chevy, Lena, and Power-Up Audio again in the future. Scaling the core team up post-Celeste has ultimately been a failure, and that's okay. We gave it all we've got, and life goes on. We are happy to return to our roots and reclaim some joy in our creative process, and see where that takes us.
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